Many of us doubt that Iran is on the way to build a nuclear bomb. Trying to find the truth is not easy. It was a bit of a one sided conversation since I don’t know the inner workings of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN body that monitors nuclear developments. But Robert Kelly, a nuclear energy engineer and ex-department director at the IAEA, has brought me up to speed.

 

Those, like some highly placed people in the US government and Congress, who say it is inevitable that Taiwan with its population of 23 million will one day return as part of mainland China rather as Hong King did, have really missed a beat. There is simply no likelihood that an overwhelming majority of Taiwanese will ever agree to that. The leader of the independence-minded Democratic Progressive party, Ms Tsai Ing-wen, may have gone down to defeat in Saturday’s election but she did gave the victor, Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang party, who is pro reunification- although at some distant date- a close run.

 

Every so often, but not very often, the tectonic plates in society visibly move. In the last century it was the impact of the Great Recession closely followed by a second massive war in a century that pushed both the victorious and the losers in the direction of a welfare state, albeit the Europeans, Canadians and Japanese moved at a much faster rate than the Americans.

This week Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is back. Who, you might say? She is the person, in the early 2000s, who as finance minister under Nigeria’s democratically elected president, Olusegun Obasanjo, turned the Nigerian economy around 180 degrees. Before that, under the military dictatorship which had ruled Nigeria, Africa’s most populated country, for 18 years, economic growth, despite the huge oil wealth, had not risen above 3% a year. The economy was badly sick and billions of dollars were skimmed off by the dictator, Sani Abacha, and those around him. Inflation and bank indiscipline brought havoc and instability to the economy. The poor got poorer.